Posts on the Horizon

• If I were a god-king (a series)
  
• The five blogs I (and you should) read daily
  
• Why we need to branch out into space, and how to do it
  
• What I learned about a fairly-famous dissident-linguist
  
• A review of Chesterton’s bio of Thomas Aquinas
  
• A week in the life of a poor musician circa-early-1990s
  
• Something abbreviated EFT (the verdict’s still out, though)
  
• A review of my favorite Oliver Stone movie, JFK*
  
• My brief career as a filmmaker in the 1970s
  
• The tribute to Leroy, a childhood pet
  
• Something cool I just learned about an old Jimi Hendrix song
  
• A meditation on Hell (light-hearted family fun!)
  
• “What did you want to be when you grew up, Daddy?”
  
• How to turn the economy around – now!
  
• A short story written in 1999, now warped for 2008
  

* Just for the record, this is really the only Stone movie I like. The only other one I can tolerate is Platoon, and, maybe, Wall Street.

Nonfiction

For the past couple of years I’ve felt the urge to write a non-fiction book. Take a subject and research it, master it, and explain it in an enjoyable and interesting way to the masses. Now, I’m not an expert in anything really, more of a “jack of all trades,” which is okay for a writer, I suppose. But the lure of knowing every single thing there is to know about a single subject is very, very powerful to me.

Obviously I couldn’t do this unless this was all that I did. So last night I did a little thought-experiment. Assume I had a fixed income of, oh, I don’t know, how ’bout half-a-million a year? That would allow me to quit my job, allow my wife to quit hers and take care of the children, and give me the freedom to explore such odd projects.

If that was the case, what would I write a nonfiction book about, just to prove I could master a subject?

I came up with over a dozen ideas. Some have been nagging at me for a while, some just kinda popped into my head while I was brainstorming. None are calculated to sell a gajillion copies or be on the top ten NY Times bestseller lists. Quite simply, it would be a labor of love.

What would I write about?

In no particular order, here’s what I came up with:

* Cold fusion
* Faster-than-light travel
* Superconductivity
* Cryogenics

That covers the physics interests I’ve had for a while. Now, what about philosophy?

* In-depth biographical and literary sketch of a pre-Socratic philosopher
* Take what’s sensible in all the philosophy I’ve read, synthesize it, and “move it up a couple of dimensions.” What this means exactly, I’m not quite sure.

I’ve always loved music. I’ve always thought the lives of most composers to be extremely fascinating. Two in particular I would study:

* A biography of Antonin Dvorak
* A biography of Jean Sibelius

Religion? That’s simple.

* The biography of a Saint. Who? Well, I’ve a special fondness for a couple: Ignatius of Loyola, Francis de Sales, Aquinas. Maybe more, but that’s who come to the forefront of my mind when I wrote this down last night.

Health?

* Nutrition and natural healing. A subject I’m currently exploring, with seesawing efforts and results.

Quirkiness and weirdity? Covered.

* UFOs in the USA 1897-present. “America’s Mythology.” Done well in a book by Curtis Peebles, but I feel I could add my own quirky weirdness to it and make it strangely readable, a mix of truth, fiction, and everything in between.

And this last topic really, really appeals to me. Take a single event in history, and master it. Know everything there is to know about it. Inside and out. Micro and macro. Be an authority. What events am I talking about? How about –

* The JFK assassination. (Probably an unlikely selection as there is, as of 2004, over 430 books written on the subject.)
* The atomic bomb. Mixed feelings, here.
* The moon landing. Strong feelings, not mixed at all.

Lots of stuff there to think about. If I could only find an extra 30 minutes a day … for a year or so … who knows?

One Year and a Decade

I’ve read that we often overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade. Does this make sense?

Broadly and generally speaking, what have I accomplished in the past year? I’ve had two surgical procedures on my heart and my wife gave birth to our second daughter. Not really accomplishments, though. I’m at the same job, in the same position, for the same pay. I’m driving the same car, and I go home to the same house. We did have the basement renovated and I turned my wife’s old office into our eldest’s bedroom. I’ve read about a dozen books. As far as writing goes, I’ve done this blog, just about a post every day, for eight months. Other than that, I’ve completed no short stories or drafts of larger works.

How about ten years? What’s gone by in a decade? Just this: got married, moved a couple of times, bought a house, repainted every room in the darn thing, had a daughter, bought an SUV, had five jobs in different fields at different salaries for varying lengths, wrote two novels and fifteen short stories, quit smoking, fiddled about with weightlifting and running and golf, made a couple of new friends, spent a couple of annual vacations in Cape Cod, read close to a hundred and fifty books, plus all that good stuff in the preceding paragraph.

I’m sure you can fill two large paragraphs with accomplishments / major life events. I encourage it; it’s a little exercise that’ll make you feel a little bit better about yourself.

Now, interpretation about the original point.

After my first child was born, I thought a lot about goals. Never having truly put pen to paper before concerning such a subject, I did a bit of soul-searching. As I mentioned elsewhere I came up with over a hundred goals, grouped them into major objectives, listed sub-goals, etc.

Biting a tad more off than one can chew, dontcha think? But the point I want to make is that that year, 2005, I really accomplished more than I had any other year of my life. I think; I’m biased. But I think I did. This proved to me the old maxim, what get’s measured get’s done. Still, though, I only accomplished a fraction of what I wrote down in the Excel spreadsheet.

So, yeah, I think we overestimate what we can accomplish in a year. For me, make that “way overestimate.”

But the second part of the opening assertion is the real interesting part, in my opinion. Why? Well, it meshes with that image I find so attractive, that of a ship making a one degree course correction. After a fair amount of time’s passed, the change in course is so great that it boggles the mind to think it was only 1/360th of a circle change in direction.

There’s a philosophy of life that one can adopt that has no official name to my knowledge but is, simply, constant progress. Otherwise known as baby steps. It’s what I’ve been doing this past month. Baby steps. Slight, small, tiny changes in behavior, minute changes in habitual thought, little things done on a daily basis that might not have been done otherwise. It has tremendously revamped my mood of late. Yes, I have a ton of responsibilities and a ton of urgent matters to attend to, along with all the requisite worries in this recession, but I actually feel good about myself now that I’m adhering to this slight but constant progress. Just do a little thing every single day.

Who knows: in ten years I may even be living the life I imagined I’d be living at 40!